Music in the night: The anachronism edition

Here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, we're taking a break this week from the Big Show, but not from music in the night.

In the process, I may have accidentally created a historical, technological and cultural mishmash for the ages. Let me explain here. 

While doing some maintenance on our laptop (and waiting for the interminable latest major update to Windows 10 to . . . well . . . terminate), I decided to listen to the radio. So I turned on our 1928 RCA Radiola 18, one of the earliest "light socket" sets, which translates to "electric" from the 1920s technobabble.

IN 1928, a technomiracle was as simple as "No more messy lead-acid batteries in the living room!"

"OK, whatevs," you say. But I totally get it. F'rinstance:

What if everybody's big flat-screen TV set ran off car batteries. In a cabinet. In your living room.

THEN, WHILE still waiting for the computer to update while listening to the local AM-oldies station, I decided to take a couple of geeky, artsy photos with . . . my iPhone. While the radio still is going strong after 91 years, I do not expect the iPhone to still be operational decades after I have ceased to.

Then I uploaded the pictures to the iMac, edited them, then uploaded the finished products to the blog, via the Internet.

So what you see here is a nine-decade span of technological advancement (whether it's "progress" is debatable, depending), several massive leaps of the human imagination and at least as many head-spinning cultural shifts spurred by all the other shifts.

That, when you come to think of it, kind of tires you out. That is all.

Magic lanterns speak in the night

Fire in a glass jar.

Lightning in a bottle.

The warm glow of magic in a darkened room.

This was radio once -- pictures of the mind riding electromagnetic waves through the ether, through glowing filaments in an airless bottle, out a loudspeaker and into your imagination through your ears.

These pictures are what that looked like . . . and looks like today, 83 years after this Radiola 18 originally took up residence in some 1920s radio household. Now it resides in our radio household, though what comes through the cone loudspeaker in 2011 is hardly as exotic as the offerings of 1928 seemed to entranced citizens of a newly established Radioland.

You've seen pictures like these before in this space; they were from our other Radiola 18, the console set.

THESE PHOTOS ARE from the table model -- quite a large table model, to be sure -- which rests not on a table top, but instead on a wrought-iron stand that contains the set's large loudspeaker.

As I've said previously, radio once was an art form. Radios were art installations.

Now, radio is decidedly utilitarian, and barely that. But if you look hard enough -- and find something old enough that still works enough -- the art shines forth from a fire in a glass jar.

Lightning in a glass bottle.

The warm glow of magic in a darkened room.

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

When radio was an art form

Computer chips are boring square blocks with a porcupine fetish.

Transistors are little blocks of plastic, metal and minerals.

Vacuum tubes are Dale Chihuly masterpieces of glass and wonder. The older they are, the more spectacular, these little jars of fire and light that bring the world wondrous sounds.

I WAS THINKING about that after our little video demonstration Wednesday of my 1928 Radiola 18 console. Really, that radio is so old, it was made when RCA was an American company.

A big American company at the forefront of an exciting modern world of sound . . . and eventually sight.

Magic waves flying through the ether.

An entire world flooding your parlor at the flick of a switch.

It was the birth of the first "golden age" of mass entertainment. The birth of the "network." The birth of a truly mass culture.


THIS OLD Radiola represents an age of technology that looked a lot more like art. It represents an age, too, where life was more Chihuly and less commodity.


I WAS born into the last echoes of that age -- the age of wooden cabinets and shiny metal trim and tail fins. The age of RCA and Zenith and Philco and Silvertone. The age of flying by the seat of your pants and artistic statements.

The age where radios meant a warm, orange glow in a darkened room, a certain "ethereal" aroma and friendly voices from far away on a summer's night.

I was born into the age of vacuum tubes. And I miss it so.

Dancing the Charleston to heavy metal

When this radio was new, Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States.

The Jazz Age was in full swing.

Flappers were flapping in speakeasies, and everybody was swilling bathtub gin. Wall Street was still flying high, and brother most certainly could spare a dime.

Not that you'd need him to. Yet.

This is an RCA Radiola 18, most likely in a custom cabinet. This is what you call heavy metal.

If you love vacuum tubes, this is your radio. See the big tube in the back? That's the rectifier, and it appears to be original to the set, manufactured sometime between summer 1927 and 1929. It's one of the earliest radio sets to run on "lamp current" -- that's 120 volts AC to you and me.

IN 1927, the norm was for your home radio (assuming you could afford one) to operate off of a couple of batteries -- one of them a big wet-cell not so different from what's under the hood of your car. That changed with the Radiola 17 and Radiola 18.

In 2011, this Radiola 18 still works just fine. A little arthritic, maybe . . . but aren't we all?

If you're not duly impressed (and I add that, as far as I know, this old girl has never been restored), let me ask you something.

Do you think your iPod will still be functional in 2095?

Do you think you will?